Connectivity and web access
A significant fraction of rural regions remains disconnected with no network connectivity. Conventional wire-line connectivity solutions (fiber, broadband and dial-up) and wireless connectivity solutions (WiMax, cellular or satellite) are not economically viable for regions with low purchasing power and low user-densities. Achieving economic sustainability in the face of low demand imposes several practical design constraints: low network costs, low power consumption, high reliability and low management overhead. In contrast, cellular networks consume very high power and also face high capital and operational expenses (tower, power, management, spectrum). Achieving a combination of high-performance, high reliability and low power consumption is a fundamentally hard problem. Performance is often terrible in rural settings due to extremely poor signal quality at long-distances. A second factor that affects performance of wireless networks is interference. Rural regions lack stable and reliable power sources; grid power also exhibits significant fluctuations (between -1000 V to +1000 V) that result in high device failure rates. Finally, managing rural wireless networks is very hard due to problems with reliability and power and lack of local management
Our long term goal in this area is to design an extremely low-cost, high-performance, low-power, highly reliable and easy to manage rural wireless network where the entire network is completely solar-powered with no dependence on the power grid. Addressing the rural connectivity problem has been a fairly massive initiative and a lot of students from NYU and UC Berkeley have worked on different bits and pieces of this project. Below is a list of our projects and a brief description of each project.
Cellular networks in developing regions rely heavily on diesel for energy to provide network coverage due to the paucity of reliable grid power which directly impacts the economic viability of the network and long-term sustainability while also leaving a massive carbon footprint. In this paper, we propose the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of GreenLinks, an intermittency-aware green cellular network architecture that provides a virtual cell abstraction to extend cellular coverage to areas with unreliable power in a sustainable manner with minimal carbon footprint.
Mobile devices are increasingly becoming vulnerable to a variety of network-level security threats including different types of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks such as message interceptions and modifications, eavesdropping on calls and text messages, message spoofing and phishing attacks. In this paper, we propose the design and implementation of Secure Mobile Identities (SMI), a secure key-exchange protocol that enables a mobile user to establish a secure and trustworthy communication channel with other mobile users in the face of external adversaries.
While the cellular revolution has made voice connectivity ubiquitous in the developing world, data services are largely absent or are prohibitively expensive. Hermes is a point-to-point data connectivity solution that works by modulating data onto acoustic signals that are sent over a cellular voice call.
A low-cost technology that makes solar electrification more sustainable and feasible especially in Sub-Saharan Africa by using existing mobile network infrastructures.
ROMA is a practical, distributed channel assignment and routing protocol that achieves good multi-hop path performance between every node and one or moredesignated gateway nodes in a dual-radio network.
WiFi-based Long Distance (WiLD) networks with links as long as 50–100 km have the potential to provide connectivity at substantially lower costs than traditional approaches. However, real-world deployments of such networks yield very poor end-to-end performance. WiLDNet makes several essential changes to the 802.11 MAC protocol, but continues to exploit standard (low-cost) WiFi network cards.
Funding
CTED
NSF
Google